22 June 2012

Famous Food Friday -- Ernest Hemingway

A week or so
back, my cable inadvertently turned on HBO and I taped a few things before they
cut the feed. One was Hemingway & Gellhorn. I
love Clive Owen, but I can't say that I have ever been a big fan of Nicole
Kidman. When the movie started, I was pleasantly surprised that I like
Kidman as the elderly Gellhorn.

Clive Owen
played Hemingway in the irascible, horrible, pain-in-the-ass way that one
expects he might have been, but frankly Clive Owen is no Hemingway.
Every time someone called him "Papa" it made me laugh.
Hemingway at his most filthy and uncouth still managed to get the girl, which I
find interesting if not a bit odd. Clive Owen covered in sewage would
always get the girl. On of the producers of this film was James
Gandolfini. Gandolfini would have been a great "Papa" so why do
they always cast the pretty boy? Kidman spent a lot of her time
throwing her rucksack across her shoulder. It seemed to make kidman
uncomfortable, as this was probably the first time on 30 years that she ever
carried her own luggage. I think Philip Kaufman is a great director and Henry
& June is one of my favorite movies. It is too bad that Kaufmann
didn't cast Hemingway and Gellhorn with the same quirkiness he used in Henry
& June. It might have been
greatly improved.

There is a good
bit of food in Hemingway's writing and historian Craig Boreth compiled many of
those recipes in The Hemingway Cookbook. Long out of print
and quite collectible, the book is getting a second shot this year when it is
republished and launched again.

During one
scene in the Hemingway & Gellhorn the couple is in the famous
El Floridita.

Hemingway at El
Floridita with his arm around Spencer Tracy and his back to wife number four,
Mary.

There Hemingway
makes his favorite drink, the Papa Doble. This recipe is based upon the
Daiquirí recipe from El Floridita that Hemingway drinks with A. E. Hotchner in
his book Papa Hemingway.

Papa Doble or
Hemingway Daiquirí

2 1/1 jiggers
Bacardi or Havana Club rum

Juice of 2
limes

Juice of 1/2
grapefruit

6 drops of
maraschino (cherry brandy)

Fill a blender
one-quarter full of ice, preferably shaved or cracked. Add the rum, lime juice,
grapefruit juice and maraschino.

Blend on high
until the mixture turns cloudy and light-colored, "like the sea where the
wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty
knots." (Islands in the Stream, p. 281).

Here is another
example of Boreth pulling a recipe from fact and fiction.

"Aboard
the Pilar, Ernest's beloved fishing boat, food took on epic
proportions. Even something as simple as a peanut butter and onion
sandwich, his lunchtime favorite, can be elevated to heroic status while at
sea:

"Well, go down to the galley and see if that
bottle of tea is cold and bring
it up. Antonio's butchering the fish, go make a sandwich will you,
please?"
"Sure. What kind of sandwich?"
"Peanut butter and onion if there's plenty of
onion."
"Peanut butter and onion it is, sir."
He handed a sandwich, wrapped in a paper towel
segment, to Thomas Hudson and
said, "One of the highest points in the sandwich-maker's art. We call it
the Mount Everest Special. For Commanders only." (From Islands in the
Stream, p. 390-1).

A.E. Hotchner, in his biography, Papa Hemingway, notes that this
sandwich,
along with a glass of red wine, was Hemingway's favorite (Papa Hemingway,
p. 194)."

Mount Everest
special

2 slices white
bread
Peanut butter
2 thick slices onion

Spread one piece of bread thickly with peanut butter. Lay onion slices on
top. Cover with second slice of bread.

Clearly, there
must have been something magical about Hemingway. Name the last dirty
guy, covered in fish scales and reeking of peanut butter and onions that you
would take home to mama?

UPDATE:

For those of you who don't like trolling comments, The Ancient pointed out that while living with and married to Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway was kind of a babe. We do love blogging as our horizons are always broadened. Perhaps we did have a bit of Hemingway bias, but remember, peanut butter, onions, fish guts... not to mention he will steal your job...

3 comments:

The parts where Hemingway appears are very droll, and you can easily see where it influenced the movie.

As for Hemingway and Clive Owen, bear in mind that "Papa" was then nothing like the pathetic, white-haired, addle-pated wreck he was when he died. Even at the end of his relationship with Gellhorn, he looked like this --